Sharra's Exile (29 page)

“Kennard had me taught to read and write, though I must admit I wasn’t tremendously apt at either,”

Lew said. “Lying in the hospital, I made up for lost time; but boys are still being brought up as if it was unmanly—I imagine it’s because a scholar hasn’t enough time to master weapons, and of course when the Domains were one constant battleground year after year, that was the most important thing in a boy’s education, to be good with a sword and weapons. Even when I was a boy, there were bandits enough in the Kilghard Hills. For centuries Armida had to be kept like an armed camp. Kennard would never have been criticized, if he’d kept me there to defend his lands instead of sending me into a Tower

—”

Regis picked up the unspoken part of that too: that Lew’s work in the Arilinn Tower, his skill at matrix technology, had led to the Sharra rebellion, and to the sword that was not a sword, the sword which concealed
Sharra
—

And he saw it growing, blossoming behind Lew’s eyes, the look of horror that slid over Lew’s face, felt his own hair rising as the flames flared in his mind…
Sharra
! He looked at Lew. The smiling man, the kinsman with whom he had been calmly discussing the merits of Darkovan versus Terran education, was gone; Lew’s face was dead white, so that the scars stood out like crimson brands, and his eyes were—blank horror, staring at nothing Regis could see. But they could both see it, the raging, ravening form of the fire-Goddess, straining against the chains, fire-locks tossing high against the sky… She was not in the quiet street around them, she was not in this world at all, but she was there,
there
in their minds, horribly present for both of them…

Regis breathed hard, forcing himself to control the trembling of his hands, reached out for Lew’s mind, tried to do what he had done with Javanne’s, to pick the fire-form out of the texture of Lew’s thoughts… and found something he had never touched. Javanne had seen Sharra only in his mind; Rafe had only seen the matrix… this was something else, something more dangerous; he saw a face, lean, wolfish, colorless hair, colorless gray eyes, and a woman’s face like a restless flame—

“Kadarin—” he gasped, and never knew whether he had spoken aloud or not. The frozen, static horror left Lew’s eyes. He said grimly, “Come on. I’ve been afraid of this—”

He began to run, and Regis, following, could feel the jolting pain, like fire in Lew’s hand—a hand that was not there, a phantom fire… but real enough to make sweat stand out on Lew’s forehead as he ran, jolting, uneven, his good hand gripping a dagger in his belt—

They turned into an open square, heard shrieks, cries. Regis had never been inside the Alton town house, though he had seen it from the outside. Half a dozen of the uniformed City Guard were fighting in the center of the square; Regis could not see who they were fighting. Lew cried out, “Marius!” and ran up the steps. The door suddenly burst open, and at the same time Regis saw flames shooting from an upper window. One of the Guardsmen officers was trying to organize people into a fire-fighting line, water being passed from hand to hand from the nearest well and from a smaller well in the garden behind the house, but it was utter confusion.

Lew was fighting, on the steps, with a tall man whose face Regis could not see, fighting one-handed with his knife.
Gods! He has only one hand
! Regis ran, whipping his sword from its sheath; saw Andres struggling with a bandit who wore the garb of the mountains…
but what are mountain men
doing here in Thendara
? The Guards flowed up the steps, an officer shouting to rally them. It was hard, in the press, to tell friend from foe; Regis managed to get himself back to back with Lew, covering him, and for a moment, as his sword went up, he saw a face he recognized—

Gaunt, gray-eyed, lips drawn back in a feral scowl
…
The man Kadarin looked older, more dangerous
.

His face was bleeding; Lew had somehow slashed him with his dagger. Behind Regis there was a great cracking roar, like an explosion; then Guardsmen were hurrying everyone down the steps, shouting urgently, and the house buckled slowly and erupted skyward. Regis was driven to his knees by the force of the blast. And then there was a high, clear call, in a woman’s voice, and suddenly the bandits were gone, melting away across the square, evaporating like mountain mist into the labyrinth of streets.

Dazed, Regis picked himself up, watching the Guardsmen struggling with the remains of the burning house. A cluster of scared servant women were crying in a corner of the garden. Andres, his jacket unlaced, his face streaked and grimed with smoke, one boot unlaced, limped down the stairs and bent over Lew. Jeff came and helped Lew to sit up.

Lew said in a sick, dazed voice, “Did you see him?”

Regis bent and pressed him back. “Don’t try to sit up.” Blood was flowing down Lew’s face from a cut on his forehead; he tried to wipe it out of his eyes with his good hand. Lew said, “I’m all right,” and tried to struggle to his feet. “What happened?”

Jeff Kerwin stared at the knife in his hand. It was not even bloody. “It all happened so fast. One minute all was quiet, the next, there were bandits all over the place and one of the serving-women shouted that the house was on fire… and I was fighting for my life. I haven’t held a knife since my first year in Arilinn!”

Lew said urgently, “Marius! Gods of hell, Marius! Where is my brother?” Again he started up,

disregarding Andres’s restraining hands. The horror was in his eyes again, and Regis could see in his mind the great flaming image, Sharra, rising higher and higher over Thendara… but there was nothing there. The street was quiet, the Guardsmen had the fire out; though there had been something like an explosion in the upstairs floors and there was a great gaping hole in the roof. Regis thought, with wild irrelevancy, that now Lew had no choice but to move into the suite in Comyn Castle which had, from time out of mind, been reserved for the Alton Domain. Jeff was touching, with careful hands, the cut on Lew’s head.

“Bad,” he said, “it will need stitches—”

But Lew struggled away from them. Regis grabbed him; laid his hand urgently over his eyes, and reached out with his mind, struggling to banish the ravening form of fire from his mind— slowly, slowly, the flames died in Lew’s mind and his eyes came back to reality; he staggered, letting himself lean on Jeff’s arm.

“Did you see him?” he asked again urgently. “Kadarin! It was Kadarin!
Do they have the Sharra
matrix
?”

Regis, staggering with that thought, compelled by Lew’s horror, suddenly knew this was what Callina had feared. Lew demanded, “Marius! Marius—” and stopped, his voice strangling and catching in a sob.

Merciful Gods! Not this too! My brother, my brother
…He collapsed on the steps like a puppet whose strings are cut, his shoulders shaking with grief and shock. Jeff came and held him as if he were a child; with Andres, somehow they got him up the steps. But Regis stood still, looking at horror beyond horror.

Kadarin had the Sharra matrix.

And Marius Alton lay dead somewhere inside the burning house, with a Terran bullet through his heart.

CHAPTER SIX

Lew Alton’s narrative

Here.” Jeff shoved a mirror into my hand. “Not as good as a Terran medic might have done—I’m out of practice—but it’s stopped the bleeding, anyhow, and that’s what counts.”

I shoved the mirror away. I could—sometimes—make myself look at what Kadarin had left of my face; but not now. But none of it was Jeff’s fault; and he had done his best. I said, trying to be flippant, “Just what I needed—another scar, to balance the top and the bottom of my face.”

He had gone all over me very carefully, to make sure that the blow to the head had left no aftereffects; but the cut was only a surface wound and fortunately had missed my eye. I had a headache roughly the size of Comyn Castle, but otherwise there seemed to be no damage.

Through it all was the haunting cry that would not be silenced, like a roaring in my mind; …
to
Darkover, fight for your brother’s rights
… and now would never be stilled. Marius was gone, and my grief was boundless; not only for the little brother I had lost, for the man he was beginning to be, that I would never, now, know. Grief, and guilt too, for while I had stayed away, Marius was neglected, perhaps, but alive. He might have lost the Domain; but as a Terran he might have made a good life somewhere, somehow. Now life and choice were gone. (And beneath grief and guilt a deeper layer of ambivalence I would not let myself see; a trickle of relief, that I need never, now, risk that frightful testing for the Alton gift, never risk death for him as my father had risked it for me…)

“You have no choice, now, but to move into the Alton apartments in Comyn Castle,” Jeff said, and I nodded, with a sigh. The house, at least for the moment, was uninhabitable. Gabriel had come, with the final crew of Guards who had gotten the fire out. He offered to arrange for men to guard the ruins and prevent looting until we could get workmen to repair the roof and make the place weatherproof again.

Every room was filled with smoke, furniture lying blackened and ruined. I tried without success to close my eyes and nostrils to the sight and smell. I have… a horror of fire, and now, I knew, somewhere at the back of my mind, if I gave it mental lease, the form of fire was there, raging, ravening, ready to destroy…and destroy me with it.

Not that I cared a damn, now
—

Andres looked twenty years older. He came to me now and said, hesitantly, “Where—where shall we take Marius?”

It was a good question, I thought; a damned good question, but I didn’t know the answer. There had never been any room for him in the Comyn Castle, not since he was old enough to notice his existence; they had never noticed it, in life, and now, in death, they would not care.

Gabriel said quietly, “Have him carried to the chapel in Comyn Castle.” I looked up, startled and ready to protest, but he went on: “Let him have that much in death, kinsman, even though he didn’t have it in life.”

I looked on his dead face only once. The bullet that had smashed out his life had somehow left his face unmarked; and he looked, dead, like the little brother I remembered.

Now indeed I was alone. I had laid my father to rest on Vainwal, near my son, who had never lived except in the dreams I had shared with Dio before his birth. Now my brother would lie in an unmarked grave, as the custom was, on the shores of the Lake of Hali, where all the Hastur-kin were laid to rest.

A thousand legalities separated me from Dio.

I should never have come back here! I
stared at the lightly falling snow in the street outside, and realized that it did not matter where I was, here or elsewhere. Andres, crushed and old; Jeff, who had left his adopted world behind for Darkover; and Gabriel, who had his own family, but who, now, in default of any other, was Alton. Let him have the Domain; I should have sent for Marius, taken him away before it came to this…

No. That way lay only endless regret, a time when I would listen and hunger for my father’s voice in my mind because it was all I had left of the past, live complacently with ghosts and grief and guilt…

no. Life went on, and someday, perhaps, I would give a damn— for now there were two things that must be done.

“Kadarin is somewhere in the City,” I said to Gabriel. “He must be found. I can’t possibly emphasize it enough—how dangerous he is. Dangerous as a banshee, or a wolf maddened by hunger—”

And he had the Sharra matrix! And somehow he might manage to raise it again, the raging form of fire
which would break the Comyn Castle and the walls of Thendara like kindling-sticks in a forest fire…

And there was worse…I too had been sealed to Sharra…

I could not speak of that to Gabriel. Not even to Jeff. I tried to tell myself; Kadarin could do nothing, nothing alone. Even if he managed to raise the Sharra forces, alone or with Thyra… who must,

somehow, be alive too— the fires would turn on them and consume them, as they had burned and

ravaged me. I could feel my hand burning again, burning in the fires of Sharra— could feel it now, the burning that the Terran medics had called
phantom pain
— haunted, I told myself at the edge of hysteria, haunted by the ghost of my father and the ghost of my hand…and stopped myself, hard.

That way I could go mad, too. I said grimly to Andres, “Get me something to eat, find us all some dinner. Then we will take Marius to the chapel at Comyn Castle, and go there for the rest of the Council. The caretakers there will be Alton men; they’ll know me as my father’s Heir. And there’s one more person who has to be told. Linnell.”

Andres’s eyes softened. “Poor Linnie,” he muttered. “She was the only person in Comyn who cared about him. Even when no one else remembered he was alive, he was always her foster-brother. She sent him Festival gifts, and went riding with him on holidays— She had promised him, when they were children, that if he married first she would be his wife’s bride-woman and if she married first he should give her away. She came here last not a tenday ago, to tell him that her wedding with Derik had been set, and they were laughing together and talking about the wedding—” and the old man stopped, quite overcome.

I had not seen Linnell to speak to since I came back. I had thought, when I went to speak with Callina about making the Sharra matrix safe, I would pay Linnell my respects— she was nearer to Marius’s age, but we had been friends, brother and sister. But there had been no time. Now time was running out for us; and I must speak with Callina too, not only as kinswoman but as Keeper.

I too had been sealed to Sharra… they could draw me into that unholy thing, at any moment
—

I bent over Marius’s body; took the little dagger from his waist. I had given it to him when he was ten years old; I had not realized that he had borne it all these years. In the years on Vainwal, I had not remembered to wear side-arms. I slipped it into the empty sheath in my boot, startled at how easily the gesture came after all these years.